Books & Literature

A very small sample of the many, many books in my voluminous library.

I currently own four domain names (and around 3,000 dead-tree books!). While books and literature are woven through all of my sites, the ones below are especially focused on the topic.

Baquet's Guide to the World's Classics: This is a well-developed (but incomplete) site about, well, the world's classics, from many cultures. Of special interest are:

• The Chronology, a listing of around 1,400 books and authors, from the Ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh (c. 2100 BCE) to the Indian American author Jhumpa Lahiri (born 1967).
• The Calendar, a clickable listing of births and deaths of great authors, arranged day-by-day throughout the year.
• The heart of the site; most other features link to the 1,400 or so Listings of books and authors, giving "just the facts": dates, language(s), and significance.
• Links to, and listings from, the 14 Lists used to create the master list, and some background on each list, called the Inclusions.

There are also pages dedicated to the mechanics of the site:

• Blatherings, articles on each era and on a few late-September early-October dates;
• Labels or "Guide pages" to direct the reader to books and authors by countries and cultures, regions, languages, eras, genres, subjects, religions, and honors (the big prizes, and laureates);
• Archives, a handful of longer articles to support some of the brief listings; and
• The 300, a shameless (and failed) attempt to gin up some financial support.

The Guide also has a Twitter account.

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I also made two more-or-less successful sites about books and reading:

• The Best Stories Ever Told is an ongoing selection of lessons featuring short stories and passages from longer works. Started in October, 2023, it's still going.
• The Third Tale was a Weebly site where I occasionally blogged on books and religion; there was also a Facebook page to promote it.

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And here's a collection of barely-begun pages that may be worth a cursory glance:

• A Decade of Great Books: another abortive effort: I was going to undertake a "Ten Year Reading Plan from the Great Books of the Western World." I think I made it into the second month. But what I read was GREAT!
• The Graphic Canon: an appreciation of Russ Kick's three-volume set of "great books" as made into "comics" by various artists. Still a favorite, but I got distracted... It lists the works, titles, authors, and contributors, as well as sharing some "flip-through" promotional pieces that Kick placed on YouTube.
• The Pulitzer Century: I gave myself three years to write about (but not necessarily read) every Pulitzer Prize-winning book in the field of letters (Fiction, Drama, Poetry, History, Biography or Autobiography, and General Nonfiction) for the 100 years from 1917 to 2017. Yeah, right. I never got past publishing the lists (by year, author, and prize) and the first two introductory essays on the years 1917 and 1918. Still, it's worth a look just for the incredible masthead!
• From My Library a Facebook group in which I began sharing some of the many books (and other thongs) in my voluminous (get it?) library. The books had just been shipped from L.A. after over a decade in storage, and I was so excited to see them again. Hmph. Maybe I'll revive it as a video series.
• Tailings: another FB page featuring "Bits and pieces left over from my research and reading"; like the previous item, there's just a handful of posts. ("Tailings" are the piles of debris dumped outside a mine after the ore is extracted.)